Your website is the heart of your marketing strategy and digital asset collection. If you’re letting it sit static, you might be missing out on the benefits of SEO. In fact, businesses that regularly update their blogs see a 126% higher lead growth than those that don’t.
The question most business owners have, however, is “How do I know when to update blog content?”
Top Indicators That Your Website’s Content Needs an Update
In this guide, we’ll take a look at the most important signs it’s time for a refresh and how you can go about remedying your site.
Sign 1 – Declining Website Traffic
Identifying the Issue
The biggest red flag that your content needs a refresh is a drop in site traffic. It could either be that your content isn’t very engaging or that your SEO game isn’t strong, and readers aren’t finding your content to start with.
How to Address It
The best way to get to the bottom of the issues is by looking at your back-end analytics. Google has plenty of free tools you can explore to see which pages are losing traffic and at what rate.
From there, you can create a content strategy to revitalize your old content with updated keywords, stats, and multimedia or optimize your existing content with more engaging titles, meta descriptions, and CTAs.
Sign 2 – Outdated Information or Statistics
Identifying the Issue
When you mislead readers with bad data, you risk tarnishing your authority and credibility in your niche. If your content regularly cites stats and current information, it’s worth checking to make sure they’re up to date.
How to Address It
Addressing this issue typically starts with a content audit. SEMrush has some excellent tools for crawling websites and putting outdated content in the crosshairs. Some things to focus on might include:
- Cross-checking and updating stats and old information
- Incorporating new insights and trending keywords
- Ensuring any external links go to the correct pages
Start with your most important, high-traffic pages and posts, and go from there.
Sign 3 – High Bounce Rate and Low Engagement
Identifying the Issue
If you see a high bounce rate on your site, it’s probably because your content isn’t capturing your reader’s attention. Most people click off a site if they can’t find something to fulfill their search query within the first few seconds.
In terms of low engagement, the issue could be that your current content doesn’t align with your audience’s interests.
How to Address It
There are a few ways we can lower our bounce rate and increase engagement.
For starters, we can improve readability and content structure. Your content should be easy to digest. Large swaths of text without line breaks, bullet points, or visual elements can be daunting to any reader. Make your content look visually appealing.
From there, you should consider making your content more interactive. Videos and slideshows are great for keeping people on your pages longer, while CTAs can help guide your visitors from page to page.
Sign 4 – Low Conversion Rates
Identifying the Issue
Are you driving a decent amount of organic traffic to your site but not seeing the kinds of conversion rates you think you should be seeing?
Low conversion rates often mean there’s a disconnect between what your visitors are looking for and the content you’re providing.
How to Address It
Research your buyer persona to make sure your content aligns with your audience’s needs and wants. With a deeper understanding of who you’re writing for, it’s easier to make your content more persuasive.
Update your content with stronger CTAs. If you’re not sure what’s going to work, see if you can perform some A/B testing with different copy and stylistic choices.
Sign 5 – Poor SEO Performance
Identifying the Issue
Search engines are constantly changing, meaning what worked for you a month ago may not work now. If your search engine rankings are slipping or your content isn’t performing as it should, you may need to address some issues.
How to Address It
Continuously update your content with relevant keywords, optimize your meta tags to entice people to click through, and improve your on-page SEO with the right headers, alt text, and internal linking.
The best way to find content that is underperforming is with routine SEO audits.
How to Effectively Update Your Content
The right content refresh strategy can do wonders for your SEO. Look at HubSpot, for example, which created such a successful content updating strategy that they were able to increase their monthly organic search visits by 106%.
So, how can you get similar results?
Here’s a step-by-step process we often recommend to our clients.
Keyword Research and Optimization
One of the main components Google uses to determine whether or not your content is relevant is keywords. Keyword research tools, such as SEMrush’s Keyword Magic Tool, can help you find relevant keywords that your audience is using to search for your products or services.
For example, if you run a dog food business and you notice that “ how often should I feed my dog” is a high-ranking keyword, you may consider integrating it into your blogs or creating new blogs around that topic.
Content Review and Enhancement
Remove any outdated information from your content that’s no longer relevant or accurate, including statistics, data, case studies, or anything else that may have changed since you initially published.
You may even consider adding new or more in-depth information to make your blogs more valuable for your readers.
Multimedia and Visuals Update
High-quality images and videos offer so much more than visual appeal. They keep site visitors engaged. In fact, a simple video alone can increase the quality of your page in Google’s eyes.
Internal and External Links Review
Both internal and external links play a significant role in SEO, so make sure they’re going to the right places.
Any internal links should direct visitors to relevant pages on your site, while external links should go to relevant existing pages. If you find any broken external links on your site, remove them at once.
SEO Technical Optimization
The goal of technical SEO is to make a website faster and easier to crawl for search engines. This often entails improving the technical aspects of a website, such as target keywords, meta tags, and descriptions.
Engagement Enhancements
The way in which visitors engage with your content holds significant weight on your SEO. While there are many ways you can increase user engagement on your website, start by refreshing or adding CTAs to your blogs or articles, which guide your visitors to a desired action.
We also recommend making it easy for readers to share your content on social media by placing user-friendly sharing buttons around your site.
Tools and Resources
There’s no reason to take the manual approach to content optimization when there are so many excellent tools and resources available. While many tools offer several services, our experience has taught us that certain tools are better for certain tasks than others.
Here are a few of our favorite SEO tools and resources for specific content updating tasks:
- Keyword Research: SEMrush, Ahrefs, Google Keyword Planner
- Content Editing: Moz and Screaming Frog
- SEO Optimization: Yoast SEO and Google Search Console
Leveraging Professional Services
While there are many things you can do on your own to optimize your content and boost SEO, there are several cases where working with a specialist can be the most beneficial, especially when it comes to large-scale audits and in-depth content updates.
If you or your team lack SEO knowledge, don’t have time to keep up with updates in the algorithm, or just need a thorough audit to determine where there’s room for improvement, having an SEO expert on your team will make for better results.
